Ralph Compton Showdown At Two-Bit Creek Read online

  HAVE YOU WRITTEN TO MOTHER?

  Fletcher shook his head. “Mister, she must be right proud o’ you.”

  He left the twenty dollars lying on the bar. It would pay to bury the dead should some charitable soul pass by. Otherwise, they could rot for all he cared.

  A sick, bitter emptiness in him, Fletcher took one last look at the three men, then stepped outside, gratefully gulping in drafts of cold, fresh air.

  He stepped into the saddle of his big American stud and caught up the rope of his mustang packhorse just as a small black-and-white-speckled pup ran around the corner of the dugout. The pup stopped and looked up at him, whimpering.

  “You go on home,” Fletcher said. “Find your mama.”

  The pup, his eyes wide and sad, stayed right where he was and whimpered even more.

  Fletcher nodded. “Little feller, I think maybe you don’t have a mama.”

  The pup was obviously a stray who’d been hanging around the saloon. Judging by his slatted ribs, the animal was missing his last six meals and then some.

  “Where I’m headed, I got no place for a pup,” Fletcher said sternly. “So just go on about your business. I want no truck with you.”

  He swung his horse around, preparing to ride out. The pup stood and immediately started to howl, then lay down again, resting his head on his oversized front paws, and crying softly.

  “Oh hell,” Fletcher swore. He dismounted, picked up the pup and sat him on the saddle in front of him. “You piss on me, boy, and you and me will part company right quick.”

  The pup made happy little yelping noises and began to lick Fletcher’s hand. The big man smiled. “Well, maybe not.”

  He turned his horse again and rode away from the dugout and its three dead men without a single backward glance.

  Buck Fletcher was going home, riding north with the long winds that stirred the buffalo grass of the Great Plains into a restless sea of green and brown.

  Fifteen years of wandering lay bleak behind him, and ahead ... he had no idea.

  There was little hope in him, no dream of a better life with a wife and tall sons and girls as pretty and fresh as bluebonnets in the spring. Such thoughts were for other men: ranchers, farmers, storekeepers. They were not for the likes of him.

  He knew only that he was going home. Like the ragged Vs of the wild geese in the sky over his head, it was an instinctive thing, unplanned, the action of a man who had reached the end of his rope and was now hanging on by a thread.

  A rootless, violent past lay dark behind him, and he firmly believed all that was left to him now was to die well. The closing act of a famed gunfighter’s life was remembered and remarked upon where men gathered, and Fletcher fervently hoped his final curtain would be drawn with dignity.

  Yet he feared that when death came for him, it would come as it so often did for his kind—on the filthy sawdust of a barroom floor, where he would meet it with a gun in hand, hot blood filling his mouth with a taste of woodsmoke.

  That fall of 1876, Buck Fletcher was twenty-nine years old, a tall, heavy-shouldered man with a long hatchet blade of a face honed sharp by sun, wind and hard times. Even so, women did not turn away from him, for his features were saved from irretrievable homeliness by a wide, expressive mouth that in times long past had been quick to smile and eyes that sometimes revealed a faint, self-mocking humor and a well-hidden but nonetheless inherent kindliness.

  But those eyes could change in an instant from blue to a cold, pitiless gray when the six-gun rage rose in him. Now, for eleven men, that gray had been the last thing in this life they ever saw.

  Fletcher had ridden out of the Badlands and into the Dakota Territory astride his long-legged stud, leading the mustang packhorse.

  Some packhorses pony willingly, keeping up with a rider and his mount so that the lead rope is mostly loose. But the mustang, mouse-colored and evil-tempered, was a reluctant traveler and held back constantly, pulling on the rope so that Fletcher feared his arm would be ripped right out of its socket.

  He turned in the saddle and yanked on the rope for maybe the hundredth time that morning. The mustang, resentful, unforgiving and sly, shook his head indignantly and sidestepped to his right, stretching the rope even tighter.

  “I swear, hoss,” Fletcher said bitterly, wincing against the wrench on his arm, “keep this up and before too long you and me are going to have a major disagreement.”

  The mustang, instinctively made wary by the tone of the human’s voice, once again dutifully fell into line behind Fletcher’s stud. But the big man knew by the crafty look in the pony’s one good eye that he was just lying low for the moment, planning further devil-try. As he rode, Fletcher pondered the sheer cussedness of the mustang breed and shook his head more in sorrow than in anger.

  Fletcher was tired, tired beyond his years. It was the tiredness he’d seen in men when they were old and full of sleep, seeking only a rocker in the shade where they could doze away the long, empty days.

  But such a life was not for him. He had thought to head for Deadwood and the gold fields where mine shafts were boring deep into the Black Hills and the precious orange metal was being ripped from the earth.

  Where there was gold, there were miners, and where there were miners, there were those who preyed on them: gamblers, loose women and the sellers of bad whiskey. It was a combustible mixture that led to violence, gunplay and dead men. It was a place for a man like Buck Fletcher.

  Somewhere back on the trail from Montana, he’d heard that the Denver gambler Colorado Charlie Utter was in town, and Charlie owed him a favor or three. And Wild Bill was there. If Hickok was in Deadwood, then there was work for top gun hands. Buck Fletcher lacked even the smallest shred of false modesty. The years had taught him that he was one of the best with a gun around, maybe the best there ever was. Deadwood, wide open and roaring, could use a man with his flashing draw and steady nerves in the face of fire.

  As he followed the path of the wild geese, Fletcher didn’t know it then, but very soon that rare gun skill was a thing he would have to prove and prove again.

  He had embarked on a journey that would take him to the edge of hell—and there would be no going back.

  Chapter 2

  Keeping War Eagle Hill to his south, Fletcher crossed the East Branch, then headed due west toward False Bottom Creek.

  He was only half a dozen miles from Deadwood, yet he felt a strange reluctance to ride into the brawling, booming town where there were free-spending miners and thus money to be made, with the banks said to be handling one hundred thousand dollars in gold every single day.

  The only home he had ever known was calling out to him, and he must go there even if only for a very short while.

  Long enough to visit the graves of Ma and Pa, he told himself.

  Yes, that long and no longer.

  Then he would ride on to Deadwood.

  Fletcher crossed the False Bottom and then swung north along Sheeptail Gulch, riding through a wide-open country of grassland and rolling hills cut through here and there by shallow creeks running off the slopes of flat-topped buttes, some of them rising six hundred feet above the level.

  The Black Hills, so named by the Sioux because the pine, juniper and spruce on their slopes looked black when seen from the plains, rose majestically to Fletcher’s east, a fantastic landscape of towering rock formations and deep, blue-shadowed canyons.

  Even now, in the early fall, as the chill in the air held the promise of winter, pasqueflowers, lady’s slippers and larkspurs still bloomed on the slopes of the foothills. In the distance, Fletcher watched a small herd of mule deer step warily toward water.

  All this Buck Fletcher saw without joy.

  There was a strange restlessness in him, pushing him on—but why? And to where? He couldn’t answer.

  He rode on and linked up again with the west bank of False Bottom Creek as it curved gracefully north toward Paradise Gulch.

  He found shelter in a stand of cottonw
oods and staked out the tired horses on a patch of good grass. Then he built a fire, boiled coffee and sat with his back to a tree, rolling a smoke, a habit he’d picked up a couple of years back from the vaqueros in Texas.

  The pup he fed what he had, some beef jerky and stale biscuit, and the little animal ate hungrily.

  Fletcher lit his cigarette and smiled. “We’re two of a kind, pup,” he said. “Hungry and homeless.”

  On a hillside less than fifty yards away, a pack of wolves led by a huge, shaggy-maned lobo appeared from a stand of aspen like gray ghosts. Each head turned in Fletcher’s direction, trying to figure out who he was and what was his business in this place.

  The leader lifted his nose and read the tangled writing of the wind, attempting to find the answer. He shook his huge head, the man smell troubling him, then turned and trotted back into the trees. The rest of the pack followed, vanishing like puffs of woodsmoke. A pair of angry jays rustled in the branches, calling rude names after them, brave now that any possible danger had passed.

  Fletcher watched the wolves leave, then rolled another smoke and drank the last of his coffee. He stood and poured the dregs over the fire, waiting until the small flames died out in a final wisp of blue smoke.

  Mounting again, he shrugged into his ragged woolen mackinaw against the growing chill and buttoned it close.

  Huge citadels of black clouds were building to the north, and the air held the raw, iron smell of snow. It was going to be a cold ride.

  Fletcher rode his big stud at a fast trot northwest toward Tetro Rock, the mustang packhorse giving him more trouble than before now that his wiry strength was beginning to play out.

  About a mile shy of the rock, Fletcher turned due west again, following the route of a dry creek bed.

  This was cow country, and the ranchers in the area were growing rich supplying Deadwood’s thirty thousand hungry miners with beef. And the army too, out in strength after the Sioux and Cheyenne following the Custer disaster, was a regular—if slow-paying and parsimonious—customer.

  Fletcher stopped his horse and rose in the stirrups, looking around at the magnificent country on each side of him.

  This had been his home for the first fourteen years of his life.

  His father, a good poet but a bad farmer, had eked out a meager living here on one hundred and sixty hardscrabble acres: hard, grinding work with the plow and the hoe that had bent his back and aged him long before his time.

  Pa had introduced young Buck to books very early, especially the works of Sir Walter Scott. The boy had listened in rapt attention as his father read a chapter of Ivanhoe or The Talisman every night after supper, the poet and actor in him making the tales come alive, spinning vivid word pictures in the boy’s mind, the scarlet and blue and black of heraldic banners, the gleaming, fish-scale gray of knightly mail.

  Pa had given Fletcher a love of books that had never left him. On the packhorse, carefully wrapped in burlap, were his father’s copies of Ivanhoe and Julius Caesar, along with volumes he himself had acquired over the years, the works of Dickens and books by Carlyle, Hume, Voltaire and Cervantes. Fletcher had met men all over the West who shared his interest in literature. They were a varied breed. He’d known bartenders who were Ivy League college graduates and quoted Shakespeare, muleskinners who had attended Oxford and read Cervantes by the light of prairie campfires, Texas punchers who were qualified physicians and passed the time in winterbound line shacks poring over huge medical tomes, and he’d once known a saloon swamper in Abilene who read Plato and Homer in the original Greek and the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius in the Latin.

  Western men came from all walks of life, and far from being crude and uneducated, many—buffalo hunters, mountain men, army scouts, gamblers, miners and ranchers—were well-read, and there were hundreds who could put letters after their name.

  Fletcher’s father had been one of these, and though chronically ill-suited to farming, in the end it was not the farm but the Sioux that had killed him.

  Buck had been out hunting when the war party struck.

  Pa had been caught out in the open field behind his plow, and when he made a move for the rifle strapped to the handle, the Indians had shot him down. Ma, shaking with the fever in her sickbed, had been tomahawked and scalped where she lay, her auburn hair, thick and wavy and reaching all the way down to her waist, a valuable prize for any warrior.

  Fletcher had washed the bodies with his own hands, that being the way of the frontier, and had buried them both behind the cabin on Two-Bit Creek, saying over them the prayers he remembered.

  When it was over, and he had laid them to rest the best way he could, he had taken up his Sharps Model of 1848 rifle and, a terrible rage in him, prepared to descend upon the Sioux.

  Fletcher’s father had known Christian Sharps in Philadelphia, both men sharing an interest in poetry and literature, and Pa told him the .52 caliber Model of 1848 had been a gift.

  Sitting in his office on 30th Street, Sharps had told Pa: “Nathan, I am satisfied from many trials and personal experience that the Sharps carbine you now hold in your hands is the best weapon yet known to our country. Its range and accuracy are greater than the muskatoon, and it can be loaded at full speed.

  “Dear friend, armed as you are with my carbine, you will need no pistol and can confidently face the many trials and hazards that await you in the wild Western lands.”

  Now young Buck Fletcher was about to put Christian Sharps’ proud boast to the test.

  Back in the Dark Ages, the boy’s Anglo-Saxon ancestors had been huscarls, professional fighting men who lived in their lord’s smoky hall, their coats of ring mail chiming like silver bells when they sat at his table. The gold their lord gave them (if he was a generous lord and who among them could afford to be otherwise?) they wore on their fingers or on the hilts of their broad-bladed swords or on their great, boar-crested helmets.

  Such men lived by a code: a hard, unforgiving code of vengeance called the wergild.

  It was the blood price.

  Any man, no matter how high or low his rank, who killed the kin of one of these men, was subject to the wergild. It was a steep price, most often paid in gold or cattle, but sometimes in blood.

  The philosophy and law behind the blood price was simple: It was a reckoning. In later years, this would be known as settling the score. But though the term changed, the principle would remain the same—as would the philosophy behind it.

  In its simplest terms, as far as the Huscarl was concerned, it was the law of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.

  Now, separated though he was from those ancient times by fifty generations, the spirit of the Huscarls still stirred within Buck Fletcher. His kin had been killed, and the boy demanded vengeance as once his ancestors had done.

  He would exact the wergild, harsh and unforgiving though that code was.

  The blood price.

  He would bring about the reckoning.

  The Sioux numbered four, all warriors of name and reputation, mighty in battle and with many coups to their credit.

  Fletcher, a skilled tracker despite his youth, rode after them through the long day and into the night, his rage a dull fire in the belly.

  When full darkness came, the sky was bright with stars, and the soft spring wind stirred the buffalo grass into restless waves and carried with it the scent of early-blooming bluebells and larkspur.

  The boy rode his father’s horse, a twelve-year-old buckskin mare. But despite her years, the little horse stepped out smartly, and it was she that first reacted to the presence of humans as she caught the smell of woodsmoke in the air, and with it the sharper odor of burning buffalo chips.

  Made uneasy by the Indian smell, Fletcher felt the mare tense between his knees as she sidestepped to her right with a toss of her head, unwilling to get any closer.

  The boy whispered a few words to the horse that quieted her some. He slid from the buckskin’s bare back and, crouching low, went forward on
foot, his Sharps at the ready.

  He was wearing moccasins and made no sound as he entered a stand of aspen and scattered spruce, the underbrush thick underfoot.

  Somewhere very close an owl blinked at the moon and patiently asked his eternal question of the night; farther away, Fletcher heard the sharp, sudden yelp of a hunting coyote.

  The Indians’ fire had burned down to a dull red glow surrounded by a circle of gray ash. All four were asleep in a narrow clearing among the trees, secure in the knowledge that they had nothing to fear since only the pale and unmoving dead lay behind them.

  After the attack, the Indians had unharnessed Pa’s big Missouri mule from the plow, and the warriors had driven it off along with the milk cow.

  They had already eaten the mule, it being the most desirable of all meat. Unlike white men, an Indian gorged when he could, knowing that he might starve the next day and maybe the day after that. That was the way of the nomadic hunter, learned from bitter and hungry experience.

  The boy crept noiselessly into the camp. The Indians’ horses stood off to one side. One of them stamped a hoof and blew through its nose, alarmed by Fletcher’s sudden appearance.

  Quickly, Fletcher took his pocketknife and slashed the picket ropes of the ponies as they jerked their heads away from him in fear.

  The Sioux, full of meat and lulled by the warmth of Pa’s jug of sour mash whiskey, soundly slumbered on.

  Now was the time. The boy let out a wild war whoop, and the Indian ponies kicked up their heels and ran headlong into the camp.

  A warrior sprang up quickly, a Springfield rifle in his hands. Fletcher shot him, and the man went down, clutching his belly. Having no time to reload, the boy picked up the fallen Springfield and shot another Indian as he rose from the ground.

  Then, sprinting for the trees, Fletcher faded into the surrounding night, soundless in his moccasins as a ghost.